A Certificate in Copyright Management, originally developed for special librarians, is now open to all. The Certificate is offered from Copyrightlaws.com jointly with the Special Library Association/Click University. It consists of 5 online courses and 2 in-person courses, leading the participant from an introduction to copyright management to digital issues to teaching others in their organizations about copyright. Canadians take the primer on Canadian copyright law rather than the U.S. copyright law primer, and all other courses deal specifically with Canadian and U.S. law as well as international copyright and licensing issues. The first course, which is a 2 week . . . [more]

Steve Rubel has a post today entitled Stats: the Internet in charts.

Before you click on the link, take a guess at how long it would take you to read the entire internet if you printed it off, or how much area that paper would cover.

Or how much video gets uploaded to YouTube compared to new content aired on the 3 major US TV networks. . . . [more]

The web has certainly transformed the travel industry, and given travellers access to all sorts of amazing info about flight options, hotels and everything else business or vacation travellers would ever want to know. My friends and fellow PMAs (practice management advisors) Jim Calloway from the Oklahoma Bar Association and Courtney Kennaday at the South Carolina Bar Association wrote “Sites For Sore Eyes – The Travel Site Less Visited” which was published this month in the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division eTechnology Newsletter. They mention several sites I regularly use, and a few I don’t, but clearly . . . [more]

When I got back from vacation just over a week ago I discovered there was an elephant in the room: a possible looming federal election that no one really wanted to discuss. Except, perhaps, the media. We’ve even avoided discussing it here on Slaw for whatever reason (are we just too polite to talk politics in public? How very Canadian). In the meantime we have a lovely trio of election-related controversies from which to sample: . . . [more]

There was a piece in the Globe & Mail on Saturday (12 September, 2009, page A21) entitled, “Information-rich and attention poor” by Peter Nicholson. Nicholson’s argument is that it has become very inexpensive to produce “knowledge” and correspondingly very much more expensive to analyze what is produced. In language strikingly reminiscent of Robert Pirsig, Nicholson talks about the extent to which speed of access to knowledge has replaced depth or analysis. He says:

“… When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during . . . [more]

I’ve just started my LLM at U of T and am considering a paper/article on the limits of prosecutorial discretion. A defining personal example for me is the racing legislation under the Ontario HTA. With that legislation the Ontario Government created a circumstance where 2 identical fact situations could be subject to two different charges under the HTA at the discretion of the crown. Given that there’s unlikely to be much high level discussion of matters related to the HTA, I’m interested if any SLAW members are aware of other statutes (provincial or federal) where two identical fact situations could . . . [more]

Laws is an anagram of Slaw. So is awls. And that’s about it. Fascinating, huh?

Not really? Okay, then, how about this? Slaw is likely one of the few words that has no anagrams in the major European languages or Latin. (With the exception of Dutch — Wals, as in 1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc. — which is here deemed not to be a major European language.)

See how much innocent fun there is to be had by playing with anagrams? All of this and even more merriment is available free online, courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server. From which . . . [more]

If you’re a hockey fan, you probably know about the current dispute between the NHL and RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. You may also know about the court auction that is taking place right now – as of the writing of this post anyway – to determine the ownership of the Phoenix Coyotes.

TSN is covering the event, and using a live blogging tool called coveritlive.com to capture the play-by-play. It’s a one way communication tool in that the reporter is publishing, and receiving comments, but isn’t interacting or responding to those comments.

It also translates to different languages, and . . . [more]

Picking up on my last post here at Slaw (Social Media and Background Checks), I recently came across some excellent commentary from some heavyweight legal bloggers about managing one’s online reputation.

It begins with Jim Calloway’s post Online Reputation Management: First Rule is to Avoid Self-Inflicted Wounds. That really is the first rule and the one that is sometimes forgotten “in the moment”. Jim writes:

As we have seen with many well-documented Facebook and Twitter stories, the biggest potential danger area for damage to your online reputation is you. We saw it happen with flame e-mailing when

Cushing Academy in New England has decided to get rid of an outdated technology and embrace the future.

Says its Headmaster: “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books”

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they

I have a cottage, where I go to get away from it all. (We won’t talk about how frustrated I am that it’s one of the few places in the province where there’s no cell phone signal and that high speed internet is simply unavailable…) And I have a friend who irritates me by persisting in calling my cottage a “cabin.” It’s only a word, I know. But each time he does it, I feel like the benighted Englishman in Germany who couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the locals called a knife a Messer: “I know . . . [more]

Simon posted US Homeland Security’s new rules on laptop searches for those crossing the border into the US. While there are some guidelines, they basically have the unfettered discretion to look at everything that is on one’s laptop.

Frankly, I don’t get it. It strikes me as a total waste of time and effort on their part. It inconveniences and intrudes on normal people crossing the border – with little chance of finding any terrorist or criminal information. And how are issues like trade-mark and copyright infringement relevant to crossing the border?

This strikes me as more security theatre.

The . . . [more]